Can I Run Valheim?

Valheim is an action adventure game from Iron Gate AB, released in 2021. Coffee Stain Publishing published it. It offers a single player campaign and cooperative play. It is not Windows only, with macOS and Linux covered too. Cloud saves are enabled. With more than 455 thousand player reviews on Steam, its behaviour on real hardware is well documented. Full controller support is present, so nothing needs configuring before a pad works. It is localised into 14 languages according to the store listing. At 5 years old it targets an older hardware baseline than most buyers now own.

Developer Iron Gate ABPublisher Coffee Stain PublishingRelease 2021Genre Action, Adventure, Indie

Can your PC run it? →

System requirements

Minimum requirements

CPU	2.6 GHz Quad Core or similar
GPU	GeForce GTX 950 or Radeon HD 7970
RAM	8 GB
Storage	1 GB
OS	Windows 10 or later
DirectX	11

Recommended requirements

CPU	i5 3GHz or Ryzen 5 3GHz
GPU	GeForce GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 580
RAM	16 GB
Storage	1 GB
OS	Windows 10 or later
DirectX	11

Verified from Steam · 9 Jul 2026 source

Scores are deterministic, computed by fixed rules and benchmark tables, not written by an AI. How we score. Maintained by Farhad Ali. Spotted a wrong specification? Tell us.

Setting and environment

Players spend their time in a mythological world, moving through hostile territory. The publisher supplies 18 storefront screenshots of these environments. Play is presented from a third person view.

Why Valheim is demanding

The graphics requirement for Valheim is light. Hardware around GeForce GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 580 is enough, so Valheim runs on machines never bought for gaming. The distance between minimum and recommended is wide, so Valheim at the floor and Valheim at the recommended tier are not the same experience. Valheim expects 16 GB of system memory. The install is small at roughly 1 GB.

This reading comes from the published requirements and our own benchmark tables, not from the store listing.

Can you run Valheim?

100%

Can run iton a typical modern PC (Ryzen 5 5600, RTX 3060, 16 GB RAM), the graphics card is the tightest fit.

Valheim is light on hardware. Its minimum, GeForce GTX 950 or Radeon HD 7970, 8 GB RAM, about 1 GB free, sits below what an entry-level PC ships with today, so nearly any modern machine, and many older ones, will run it.

Bottleneck: GPU

Projected by resolution

Resolution	Projection	Headroom
1080p	Comfortable	1.89x
1440p	Borderline	1.06x
4K	Below the bar	0.47x

A projection, not a measurement. We scale the published GPU requirement by pixel count, since 1440p draws 1.78 times the pixels of 1080p and 4K draws 4 times as many, then compare against RTX 3060 / Ryzen 5 build. The publisher did not state a target resolution, so 1080p is assumed as the baseline. We hold no frame rate data, so no FPS figure is claimed. Headroom above 1 means the reference machine has room to spare at that resolution.

Common GPUs

Graphics card	Verdict
GTX 1060 6 GB	Runs great
GTX 1060 Laptop	Runs great
GTX 1650 4 GB	Runs well
GTX 1650 Laptop	Runs well
RTX 2060 6 GB	Runs great
RTX 2060 Laptop	Runs great
RTX 3060 12 GB	Runs great
RTX 3060 Laptop	Runs great
RTX 4060 8 GB	Runs great
RTX 4060 Laptop	Runs great
RTX 3070 8 GB	Runs great
RTX 3070 Laptop	Runs great
RTX 4070 12 GB	Runs great
RTX 4070 Laptop	Runs great
RX 6600 8 GB	Runs great

Each card is compared against Valheim's published GPU requirement, assuming an otherwise-capable PC. Laptop rows use the real mobile chip's benchmark, a mobile GPU is always slower than its desktop namesake.